CFP – Otherness: Essays and Studies 5.1 - September 15, 2014

The peer-reviewed, open-access e-journal Otherness: Essays and Studies is now accepting submissions for its special issue: Otherness and the Performing Arts, Autumn 2014. The deadline for submissions is Monday, September 15, 2014.

Otherness: Essays and Studies publishes research articles from and across different scholarly disciplines that critically examine the concepts of otherness and alterity. We particularly appreciate dynamic cross-disciplinary study.

Re/shaping Otherness through drama and performance is the focus of the current, special issue that explores performative and theatrical representations of Otherness. Within the spaces of theatre and the performing arts, the differential bounds demarcating otherness, such as national, cultural, religious, socio-political, sexual, gender, and diasporic delineations, are continually and constantly dramatized, disrupted, negotiated, and redrawn.

In light of the heated debates on globalization and multiculturalism in recent years, new, heterogeneous inter- and cross-cultural approaches to fluid, migrant, hybrid, transcultural worlds have emerged. In this respect, the question of Otherness is vital to the quests that arise as a result of their emergence: How do we approach these new intersubjective and dialogical perspectives of identity-seeking, self-definition, indeed, community cohesion in such a milieu? In a world increasingly global yet local, uniform yet diversified, how does this complicate relations to and understandings of others and otherness? How is relationship between dominant and peripheral cultures, self and other, reflexively re-negotiated?

For this special issue of Otherness: Essays and Studies, we invite papers that explore representations of the Other through drama and performing arts. We seek practice-led research outcomes, cross-disciplinary theoretical considerations, conceptualizations and theory formations, critical and dialogical readings of plays and performances from the multi-layered, de-hierarchized perspective of contemporary artistic experiences of Otherness and its theoretical discourse.

Welcome topics include but are not limited to:

Approaches towards and Discourses on Theatrical Representations of Otherness: Gender, Ageist, Social, Ablest, Ethnic, Class, etc. Issues Research and Analysis on Otherness and Performance Related to: Language, Space, Body, Time, History, Audience, etc. Dramaturgies of Otherness: Drama, Adaptation, Translation Cultural Relativism, Pluralism, Glocal Issues in Plays and On Stage Contact and Relationship: The Self and the Other in Drama and Performance Issues of Power: Dominant and Peripheral Cultures in Drama and On Stage Plural and Hybrid Identities in Theatre Cultural Pluralism: Aesthetic Experience of Otherness in Theatre Dialogical and Critical Approaches to Otherness through Theatrical Tools Theory Formation/Conceptualization of Otherness in Drama and Performance

Articles should be between 5,000 – 8,000 words. All electronic submissions should be sent via email with Word document attachment formatted to Chicago Manual of Style standards to the guest editors Dr. Rita Sebestyen and Matthias Stephan at otherness.research@gmail.com